Forward Deployed Data Engineer

Mecka; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Mecka in New York is seeking a Forward Deployed Data Engineer to own customer dataset deliveries and maintain technical relationships. You will analyze real-world data, ensure its quality, and deliver datasets that meet customer needs.

This senior role offers high autonomy and requires strong SQL skills and experience with data systems. Join us to impact customer success in robotics and AI.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in data engineering and/or backend engineering.
• Strong experience with large data systems and analytical workflows.
• Excellent engineering judgment and debugging ability in production systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end delivery of customer datasets.
• Build and debug data pipelines across ingestion, transformation, QA, and export.
• Analyze data distributions and deliver clean, documented datasets.

Skills

Data engineering

SQL proficiency

Large data systems

Debugging ability

Job description

About Mecka AI

Mecka AI is building the data infrastructure layer for robotics and embodied AI.

We partner with leading AI labs and robotics companies to deliver high-quality, real-world datasets used to train, evaluate, and deploy robotic systems — where model performance is dictated by data quality.

The Role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Data Engineer to operate on the frontier with customers: analyze messy, real-world data, turn it into beautiful, reliable datasets, and own the technical relationship end-to-end.

This is a senior, high-trust role with significant autonomy. You’ll combine data engineering, analytics, and product judgment to deliver outcomes customers can ship on.

What You’ll Work On

Customer Delivery & Technical Ownership

• Own the end-to-end delivery of customer datasets: requirements → validation → iteration → final handoff.

• Be the technical point of contact: communicate clearly, set expectations, and close loops.

• Turn customer needs into durable internal improvements (tooling, pipelines, standards).

Data Systems & Pipelines

• Build and debug data pipelines across ingestion, transformation, QA, and export.

• Work across storage and database types (SQL + NoSQL + object storage) and choose the right tool for the job.

• Create reliable dataset “contracts”: schemas, versioning, provenance, and reproducible builds.

Analysis, QA, and Dataset Excellence

• Analyze data distributions, identify gaps, and recommend what to collect/fix next.

• Build quality checks and acceptance criteria (coverage, consistency, integrity, edge cases).

• Deliver datasets that are clean, documented, and usable by research and engineering teams immediately.

Who You Are

Required Background

• 5+ years in data engineering and/or backend engineering (or equivalent impact).

• Strong experience with large data systems, pipelines, and analytical workflows.

• Strong SQL proficiency and comfort across multiple database/storage paradigms.

• Excellent engineering judgment and debugging ability in production systems.

Strong Signals

• You’ve owned high-stakes customer deliveries with autonomy and trust.

• You can translate ambiguous requirements into crisp dataset specs and execution plans.

• You have strong product instincts and care about polish: “would I trust this dataset?”

Why This Role

• Own the customer-facing delivery loop for world-class robotics datasets.

• High autonomy, high trust, and direct impact on customer success and revenue.

• Work across the stack: data, pipelines, analysis, and delivery quality.